Applied online and was contacted by a recruiter for the first interview. This involved a 1.5-hour online coding challenge on HackerRank. I finished it and passed most of the provided test cases.

Two weeks later, I was contacted for a phone interview. The interviewer asked me questions about finding duplicates in an array and then incrementally modified the problem to make it more difficult by asking about finding duplicates within an index range and then within a value range. I solved these with some hesitation, but it went okay overall.

The recruiter scheduled me for a second interview the following week with another engineer. This interview was entirely dedicated to coding, with no small talk. The engineer asked a question about parenthesis matching and finding the minimum number of edits to balance parentheses. This was harder as there was no clear algorithm to approach it, only general intuition about what constituted an unbalanced string. I solved it with some hints from the interviewer, who provided examples where my solution so far wouldn't work. It took me longer than I would have liked. I was also expected to produce working code that scanned input and printed statements, as HackerRank allows code execution in the browser.

I was promptly rejected, which was not surprising. They have somewhat difficult interviews. Google's interviews were conceptually harder, but Palantir cared more about details. I was also never clear about which position I was applying for, as there are several engineering intern roles, such as full-stack, backend, front-end, FDE, etc.

Second interview about producing working code that identifies the minimum number of edits needed to balance a string of parentheses.